Disney CEO Bob Iger Doesn’t Think Disney Was Actually Hacked at All

Remember when Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales was held hostage by actual online pirates, and Disney was refusing to pay the ransom despite the hackers threatening to release the film online in 20-minute increments? Yeah, nothing happened with that, did it? Probably because, as Disney CEO Bob Iger said on Thursday, Disney was never actually hacked at all.

Iger spoke about the matter to Yahoo Finance and explained that he believes the whole thing was a big Flying Dutchman-sized hoax.

To our knowledge, we were not hacked. We had a threat of a hack of a movie being stolen. We decided to take it seriously, but not react in the manner in which the person who was threatening us had required.… We don’t believe it was real and nothing has happened.

When the hack was first reported, Disney firmly stood by their decision not to pay up the undisclosed sum of money. It probably didn’t help the hackers’ chances of anyone taking them seriously that they requested to be paid in Bitcoin. It sounds like it was just a group of chuckleheads who thought they could scare the largest media company in the world into giving them money for no real reason. Iger also sits on the board of Apple, so Disney probably has access to a ton of malware options to defend their security systems.

Sony’s hack opened the floodgates to online pirates looking to make a pretty penny by burrowing into Hollywood studios and taking whatever they feel like. A hacking group purportedly stole the new season of Orange is the New Black and released it online, thought Netflix hasn’t verified that the episodes posted were real (and they probably won’t, since the new season drops at the beginning of next month anyway). While this hack wasn’t real, it won’t stop anyone from trying to steal intellectual property in the hopes of bullying a hefty sum out of their victims. For now, with Pirates 5 looking to open at around $80 million in its first weekend, Disney is doing just fine.